The person in question was talking about capitalism and how it's not a sustainable system, wealth inequality, how corruption and wealth consolidation is a feature not a bug, etc.
Then:
"There's also no magical best system we can go to. Communism would be nice, but it's just as susceptible to the flaws that come from centralization of power as capitalism is so RIP to that idea. In the absence of a perfect solution, the best we can do is look at what we have, critique it as hard as we can and advocate for something better, even if it's just incrementally better. For my part, I'd like to see a hard cap on wealth be introduced. No more billionaires. After a certain point (Say, $5 million just to pull a number out of my ass) all wealth, whether its in the form of liquid assets such as cash or iliquid assets such as property, get smacked with a 100% tax. Sell those assets off and invest/donate them (naturally, this would come with stricter regulations on charitable organizations too. No opening a "charity" to use a slush fund, like a certain ex-president on trial) or they go straight to the government. Individual ownership of corporations would also be phased out in favor of large scale profit sharing co-ops that are themselves run democratically by the workers, which is to say, workers elect their managers and bosses. Stocks and stock markets would then, not be a thing. If you want to own a piece of a company, you better work for that company. This would allow for a much more even distribution of the profits generated by the companies. No stocks means no investors which means that the majority of investment money would then come from a combination of credit unions which are formed by business in the area (since business in an area would be invested in improving the quality of life for people living there because they're run by those people that live there, so they'd want to see other business open up) and a business development fund run by the government and paid for via taxes. Is this a perfect solution? Fucking no, of course not, but it's a few steps better than what we currently have."
I'm thinking, "Hey, this person kind of gets it. I could point them in the right direction." I told them about the dictatorship of the proletariat and how successful socialism exists and has existed in the world. How there was actually a viable solution to this problem...
Then you get hit with this garbage:
"My dude, get your tankie shit out of here. The soviet union and china are neither communist nor are they "good" by any definition of the word. They're both absolutely state capitalist. While we're at it, Stalin was a genocidal maniac and Mao was a clown who either didn't realize or didn't care that forcing his farmers to make pig iron instead of, you know, farming, would lead to mass starvation. I'm sure all the people that died during the cultural revolution in china felt really uplifted. Shit man, I'm sure all those koreans that were ethnically cleansed in the USSR felt really uplifted too. What I'm suggesting is a far more realistic way to achieve proletarian control over the means of production and it's likely never going to happen, at least not in our lifetimes, and despite that, it's still a hell of a lot closer to happening than the revolution tankies like to LARP about, which would be both devastating and almost assuredly lead to fascists immediately taking control in the aftermath."
What do you even say to a person like this...? What would you even call a person like this?
Reddit moment, I guess. I'm just confused by people like this. Would anyone offer an explanation?
What I told them, for the record:
There is actually a solution to this problem; it is called proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Actual socialism.
And it's far from "magical". It's grounded in the science of Marxism-Leninism and the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Hundreds of millions of lives have been uplifted by this historically progressive system; it's been tried in the real world, and it's been successful.
These states were not idealistically perfect because after a successful revolution you actually have to deal the contradictions and material conditions that your country faces. China and the USSR were not "State-capitalist".
The nature of the state is authoritarian. But which class is it authoritarian to? It is only a mechanism of class domination. The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie (Most Western countries and European Social Democracies) has the Ruling capitalist class oppress and be "authoritarian" to the working proletariat because that's the way they maintain their rule. The goal is to flip the script; the proletariat becomes the ruling class and oppresses the small exploiting minority to maintain and defend the revolution. If they do not, the bourgeoisie will come back and destroy everything the workers have worked so hard to build. It's only one class dictatorship or the other.
As long as class contradictions exist so will the state, that is its reason for existing.
With enough time, these contradictions and classes will eventually wither away, and so will the proletarian state, as it's material base for existence is no longer there. However, for this to happen most of the entire world would have to adopt socialism. It will take a long, long time.
But once this goal in the far future is "achieved", this will be called the state of communism.
"Authoritarianism is not something to be desired, but it is a necessity in a world dominated by international capital and Reaction.
We are for the withering away of the state.
And yet we also believe in the proletarian dictatorship, which represents the tightest and mightiest form of state authority that has ever existed in history.
To keep on strengthening state power in order to prepare the conditions for the withering away of state power – that is the Marxist formula. Is it contradictory? Yes, contradictory. But the contradiction is vital and wholly reflective of the Marxist dialectic.”
--J.V. Stalin: Address to the 16th Congress of the Russian Communist Party
To finish this off with a quote from Michael Parenti:
"The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
I don't know what more I can do at that point...